Daily Inspiration Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne’s line snaps at a cozy moral reflex: the habit of treating ambition as inherently vulgar, a grubby hunger for rank that only small souls indulge. He flips the charge. Ambition, he implies, is not the tell of pettiness; it’s proof of scale. Only a creature who can imagine a larger self, a wider stage, a more demanding standard would bother to reach.

The subtext is classic Montaigne: suspicious of moral absolutes, allergic to performative virtue. Renaissance Europe loved to sermonize about humility while running on status, patronage, and court politics. In that world, condemning ambition could be less an ethical stance than a social tactic: a way for the comfortable to keep the hungry in their place, or for the already powerful to disguise their own climb as “duty.” Montaigne refuses the easy binary. A drive for advancement can be crude, yes, but it can also be the engine behind mastery, public service, intellectual discovery, even self-overcoming.

The wording matters. “Vice of little people” is a loaded phrase, not because it celebrates ruthless striving, but because it mocks the sanctimony of those who equate stillness with goodness. Montaigne’s intent is to reopen moral inquiry: judge ambition by its objects and methods, not by a reflexive disdain. In an era when “knowing one’s place” was a political commandment, this is a quietly radical permission slip to want more, and to admit it without pretending you don’t.